Happy Belated 2nd Birthday TESTHEAD

With so many things going on this past weekend, such as closing up Foundations, getting ready to start Test Design, finalizing things for my trip to Calgary to participate in the POST workshop and follow on the next weekend to head down to New Orleans for the AST Board meeting and the first day of STPCon… I realized that I forgot to mark a milestone. On Saturday, March 10th, TESTHEAD turned two years old!

The fact is, none of the things I am doing this week would likely be happening had I not taken that step. Creating TESTHEAD was my gateway into the wild and woolly world of “sapient software testing” and the community of madcap crazies that is associated with it. From very humble beginnings and months of articles that no one read, it has slowly grown to a point where I receive on average 300 page views each day. TESTHEAD led to my receiving comments and starting conversations with various luminaries in my field. It led to a joint venture with Matt Heusser in developing and producing a podcast that we now all know as TWiST. It was the reason I put myself on Twitter in the first place, and where the idea of being “the TESTHEAD” and associating myself with a crash test dummy as a humorous aside somehow resonated with a great group of people.

I wrote one of my most popular posts titled “Well, How Did I Get Here” to describe what happened in the 9 months that first followed creating TESTHEAD. At the one year mark, I was working for a different company and taking my Lone Tester view into an Agile team (and sharing the fact that it was not always an easy fit or wondering what I was doing here. That journey has gotten a little easier in the sense that I’ve embraced learning more about coding, taking on automation projects, and striving to find ways I could provide my testing ideas in new and somewhat different ways for a company that had never had a tester before. The great thing is I’ve had so many join along with me in the adventure.

During TESTHEAD’s toddler year I was elected to the Board of Directors for the Association for Software Testing, and with that I was given the opportunity to step in and become the Chair of the Education Special Interest Group and now, the whole delivery of BBST for AST members is my responsibility!

Weekend Testing Americas has taken on a life and a mind of its own, it seems, which is great because it’s the opportunities that the participants bring to it that makes it a living and lively entity. WTA has also helped me in ways to become a much better Test Manager and testing mentor. Furthermore, it has provided me with plenty of opportunities to talk about and share the model with conference audiences and small group talks over this past year.

A cool thing that also happened this year was the collaboration with Aaron Scott and his Two Leaf Clover strip, and being able to share, and laugh, and comment on some of the strips that have hit me in a funny or entertaining way. I also wonder if some of his audience has stuck around to read more of the TESTHEAD archive as well. The topper of all this is that he dedicated his strip “One for the Road” to me. It’s the one in the upper right hand corner of my site :).

To put it simply, I don’t think any of this would have happened had I not decided to put my brain on a chopping block and open myself up to potential ridicule. I think the trade has thus far been worth it. Fore those who have been part of this journey with me from the beginning, thanks for letting me reach this stage, and here’s hoping I don’t suffer from”the terrible twos” :). For those who are more recent discoverers of TESTHEAD, I thank you for making this site a regular destination, and I hope that cool and interesting things will be talked about here and that you will think of them as such and tell your friends about it. It’s been a really fun ride so far.